Want to ruin a museum director's day? Ask him about the gift shop on the first floor. You'll likely get back one of those blank Mona Lisa expressions.

Gift shops are a necessary irony of the nonprofit art museum business, allowing a bit of money changing to take place in the temples of high culture.

Consider: Museums spend millions creating great architectural altars for their artworks, followed by long campaigns reminding everyone how precious these objects are.

Then they're willing to reduce them to refrigerator magnets to raise some cash. The guilt of balancing the budget on decks of van Gogh playing cards is enough to keep any curator up at night.

The Denver Art Museum's colorful gift shop. (Ray Mark Rinaldi)

Me, I love to shop. So, a slick museum boutique, especially the new one in the Denver Art Museum's Hamilton wing, makes me feel right at home. I say bring on the Botticelli bookmarks, the Monet mouse pads.

As a neighbor, I've always had a scrappy relationship with the $110 million Hamilton addition designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. I insult it, and it insults me back. Not only does the 3-year-old building block my view of the Rocky Mountains, it makes me a little nervous. All those sharp points and cold, metal edges — it's as soothing a knife that's been left out on the kitchen counter. Inside, the slanted walls and cross-angled stairwells throw me off-kilter.

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I really did see someone trip over one of Libeskind's too-clever jutting corners one time. There might have been blood.

In return, I make mean jokes about the building. When folks ask me for directions, I tell them to look for a giant 1980 Saab that's been run though a can-crusher. I wish them luck finding the front door.

Surely, there was brilliance in Libeskind's original idea of stacking odd cube against odd cube to make a new art palace. It sure sounded good a decade ago. And the museum's non-traditional shapes do challenge Denver's thinking. If this giant building can ascend at several different heights and angles, it's natural to question why most other buildings here are so square.

In that way, it is a wonderful piece of art and it may inspire buildings to come.

It's far from perfect, however, in its 146,000 square-foot, glass-and-titanium reality. The building does little for the art; less for the skyline. Its five-story concrete garage brings down an entire block of Broadway.

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But something changed on my last visit there. The building felt a little less awkward, more welcoming. I assumed it was the new exhibit, "Embrace!" — a stellar scattering of contemporary works custom-created for that crazy stairway, the odd niche or inside the building's giant prow. But that was only part of it.

The real change was the museum's swell new gift shop, designed with tremendous care and sympathy for Libeskind by Denver's Roth+Sheppard Architects.

The shop, to the right just inside the main entrance, has no walls of its own, no front door. It simply evolves, quite casually, from the main lobby into a giant corner nook. Shoppers don't enter as much as they flow in organically as part of their museum visit — diminishing the clash of culture and commerce. Bright white, with angular counters and shelves, the shop borrows from the Hamilton building's signature motif without overdoing it.

Patrons peruse the Denver Art Museum's gift shop. (Ray Mark Rinaldi)

People still walk into the building's outwardly slanting walls — seriously, some baseboards are scuffed from so many people stubbing into them — but the shop is sophisticated and surprising all the same.

And it is pretty, notably the finely crafted millwork, shiny jewelry cases and a backlit wall that shows off the colorful glass merchandise. With a coffee counter beckoning toward the rear, the shop makes people comfortable in a place that is anything but.

Even the best museums can be tense. By their nature they make us feel insecure, lesser than. Partly because they immerse us in the sort of genius we will never possess ourselves. Partly because they surround us with more guards than a county jail. We can't touch or get too close. Heaven forbid someone sneeze on the Helen Frankenthaler.

Intimidation has value. It sets a solemn tone that forces us to actually consider the technical skills of Rembrandt, to try looking at the world the way Matisse was able to see it.

Still, gift shops offer relief, a shift in power. Inferiority is replaced by a knowing sense that those Impressionist umbrellas are really a fundraising gimmick, that those art books end up as coffee table decorations for most buyers.

In the gift shop, I am transformed from humble patron to outright customer — a role that makes me always right. And I know the cash-strapped institution, begging me to buy, needs me more than I need it.

The new DAM gift shop, integrated seamlessly, has softened the museum's edges for me. I have a better entry point now and I am learning to look around its flaws and see its smarter spaces. The stairwell is better if you take the elevator up and look down from the higher floors. The view of the building from Acoma Street, where you can't see the tilted roof, is intriguing.

Down in the gift shop, I bought a paperweight model of the museum in etched glass for $14.98. I like it because it gets me closer to thinking about the concept behind Libeskind's vision, and the risk the museum took following it, even if it was not necessarily right.

I do feel badly that it took a nice necktie display for me to let Libeskind in. But that's the way it is with architecture. The smallest something can connect you to a building. Whatever that something is, it is real and valuable.

I go to the museum regularly, five or six times a year. Now I will stop in even more. You know, take in the Western art collection around Mother's Day, see some Spanish Colonial painting during the winter shopping season.

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